NASA Funding to Establish Commercial Space Center at Mines

摘要

The National Aeronautics and Spaa Administration (NASA) will collaborate with CSM in the establishment of the Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space (CCACS) at Mines. The center is a consortium of industry, government and universities having a commercial interest in products related to combustion. Under the terms of the five-year agreement, NASA will provide the center nearly 5 million dollars in funding through the year 2001. Additional funding is expected to come from center membership fees, the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute, and project sponsorships. "Our mission is to assist industryin developing commercial products by conducting combustion research that takes advantage of the unique properties of space," said CCACS Director Frank Schowengerdt, a professor in physics at Mines, "The products developed will be produced and used on Earth, but their design will be a function of experiments done in the microgravity/vacuum conditions of space, or in the near-space conditions created by atmospheric flight or ground-based simulations."